Wednesday, June 24, 2015

More Memories Of Uniform - Tigers Edition

The Tigers have been one of the more stable teams in Japanese baseball history. They were founded in 1935 as (I believe) the Osaka Tigers but changed their name during the war to Hanshin. After the war they went back to being called the Osaka Tigers until the 1961 season, when they changed the name to the Hanshin Tigers (and adopted the interlocking "H" and "T" logo that their hats have used ever since).

This one was rough. A lot of the differences between uniforms are very subtle so it's difficult to discern sometimes just when a uniform on a card is from. For example, both the home and away uniforms appear roughly the same over the period of time from 1965-73. But names were added to the back of the uniforms in 1970 (along with a change to the Tiger head on the away uniform) and the hat logo went to multi-colored in 1972. I tried my best to get them right but there may be a mix up in some of those cards.

The Tigers have a LOT of recent alternate uniforms and I'm not sure if there are any cards available for them at all.